By GREGORY ROBERTS, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Beating the drum in advance of the governor's election trial next week, Republicans yesterday outlined new claims that King County tallied more ballots than there were voters voting in the 2004 election.

"The discrepancy is enough on its face to throw out the election," said Chris Vance, the state GOP chairman.

But in pretrial rulings, Bridges has made it clear that it won't be enough for Rossi to show that the number of ballot errors exceeded Gregoire's margin.

Citing state laws and previous court cases, Bridges has said the GOP must show that Gregoire owes her victory to illegal votes. The only exception to that requirement would be if fraud occurred -- and in a hearing May 3, Bridges said the Republicans "have never alleged, to the court's knowledge, or even alluded to fraud or voter intimidation."

Vance said that could change. "We believe that the existence of the discrepancy is evidence of fraud."

By examining election records, the Republicans have concluded that there were 875 more absentee ballots counted in King County than there were absentee voters identified in the election.

King County Elections Department spokeswoman Bobbie Egan declined to respond specifically to the latest GOP accounting. She did say that none of the calculations demonstrate fraud.

The Elections Department reported earlier that its records reflected a cumulative discrepancy of 216 more ballots than voters among the nearly 350,000 votes cast at 540 polling places on Election Day, as well as a cumulative discrepancy of 158 more voters than ballots. The department did not perform a similar analysis for the more than 560,000 absentee ballots in King County, Egan said.

Much of the rhetorical skirmishing between the parties has focused on illegal votes, including ballots cast by disenfranchised felons and provisional ballots counted without the required verification of voter eligibility beforehand. Both sides have come up with lists of illegal votes.

The Republicans hope to persuade Bridges to subtract illegal votes from the candidates' totals in proportion to the overall percentage of the vote each received in the affected precincts. Applying the formula to their list gives Rossi a victory of about 100 votes, the GOP says.

The Democrats say that method is bogus. But even if it's applied, they say, Gregoire still wins by 67 votes if their list is included in the mix.